First Look – Aliens: Colonial Marines

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When I was over at Heatwave earlier in the year, checking out Gods & Heroes, a huge bug cropped up during Scrum. The team stopped gabbing. The silence of clever people racking their brains filled the room. From the back came a lone grunt, followed by “nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” That’s how pervasive Aliens is, especially in games. The movie was fundamentally different from its subtle, stealthy predecessor Alien, owing more to Robert Heinlein’s book “Starship Troopers” or Night of the Living Dead, than Giger’s disturbingly sexual xenomorph. “It’s the game I’ve been ripping off my whole career” says the effusive and ubiquitous Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, demoing Aliens: Colonial Marines, “we put facehuggers in Duke Nukem 3D and working on the Half-Life series with its head-crabs and when we helped Microsoft bring Halo to PC, there’s the dropships and the sergeant is basically Apone. Yet we’ve never had a sincere, true sequel to it in videogame form”.

Apart from Rebellion’s amazing first attempt at Aliens versus Predator, I have to add.
Colonial Marines has been built with an entirely new engine – Pitchford describes it as an attempt to raise the bar with dynamic lighting and real-time shadows. “We love the dark corridors of games like Dead Space and we want to push it to a whole new level… Aliens is a team sport with the highest stakes. Squad-based tactics with survival horror, and it’s all canon.” Up to four players can play together and drop in and out during the campaign, and you take the part of the elite Marines, with their huge arsenal of ludicrous weaponry.

The game takes place after the events of Aliens, but brings us back to LV-426, exploring the wreckage of the colony Hadley’s Hope, finding the derelict spaceship where the crew of the Nostromo first encountered the alien eggs in Alien, and boarding the abandoned Sulaco. Our demo however starts with the marines waking from deep sleep into an evacuation scenario, there’s a crash… and three of them wake up on the planet, separated from the main team. Just another glorious day in the corps. A bit of mildly witty dialogue and they’re off, into the station.

The tension music builds as they walk through the damaged operations centre of Hadley’s Hope and we get a chance to look out over the colony. It’s a total wreck, with the familiar shell of the atmospheric processor that blew up at the end of Aliens squatting in the middle, like a popped blister the size of Nebraska. “Here we’re going to discover what happened to Hudson, Burke and all those guys who were left behind; but we’re also going to uncover new secrets.”

As we turn away from the window, that familiar, traumatising beeping starts up, getting faster. Yep, the motion tracker’s back. One of your teammates is dragged upwards, horrifyingly, as the aliens swarm everywhere, out of the ceiling, the floor, the panelling, the goddamn walls. Though they’re fast, they’re not as fluid and relentless as they were in the movies or AvP, but this is still early in development.

The protagonist kills a few with short, controlled bursts, then beats off an alien with his machine gun’s butt (not bad for a human) and runs for it, following his remaining squaddie out of the window and into the piles of wreckage from the explosion. There we encounter an entirely new type of alien – larger than AvP’s Praetorians, a great battering ram of an alien, with a huge wedge-shaped armoured head. Predictably, your small arms fire just bounces off this huge carapace.

It starts smashing through the wreckage after our fleeing soldiers and, thankfully for us, is distracted by one of our NPC squadmates, who it flattens before we can even shout “get away from her, you bitch”. Dodging past it, we run into a blockhouse and slide under the door just as it’s shutting. The giant Alien slams into the door, but can’t quite batter it down. Inside is temporary calm, in a hanger with a large number of marines getting into defensive positions in the hope of help arriving. The tracker shows the monster Alien retreating. I feel safer already.

The acting sergeant orders us to support a grunt named Bronson, who’s defending the lower passageway. We descend beneath the hanger and set up a sentry gun, just as aliens start pouring up the corridor. We hear shooting up above as well, and the enemies just keep coming. After a minute of bloody confusion in this express elevator to hell, Bronson is dragged away and we’re ordered back upstairs, leaving the sentry behind. In the hanger, it’s chaos; everyone’s being overrun. We just got our asses kicked. We choose to flee, heading for the APC at the back of the base. The lights go out and Pitchford moans “what the hell, they cut the power, man.”

In the back room, it’s last stand time. so they’re getting a cargo exoskeleton ready, attaching flamethrowers to it, setting up sentries and checking their nukes, knives and sharp sticks. It won’t make any difference; we’re all gonna die. Aliens pour in from all directions and despite the the flying lead, they overwhelm the troopers; the exoskeleton staggers down with aliens all over it, just as the tank Alien burst through the wall. It pauses, pensively crushing a marine in one of its four arms, then lollops over to us, grabs us and screams triumph in our face.

Game over, man. Until Spring 2012, that is.

(And, yes, I filled that preview with Aliens quotes. Can you spot them all?)

89 Comments

I’m confused by the switch from “they” to “we” and mixing of speaking as in character and as an observer here. Did you play the game Dan, or just watch Randy play? Is there really any deciding going on, or is this just CoD style dramatic scripted experience (which is probably the best way to do Aliens, mind)

exactly, though truth be told that one was nowhere near as bad as any/all of the humans.

I did have the Scorpion figure as a kid, but I had to dig long and hard to find it, and the only reason I put in the effort was because it was too painful for there to actually be Aliens toys yet all of them suck.

anyone else read this and constantly think, gee that sure sounds like something from “Natural Selection 2” only minus the alien gameplay and strategy stuff.

Really looking forward to this game, the recent AvP game was a big disappointment – Left 4 Dead with Aliens sounds good to me!
I only saw Aliens a few weeks ago, I think I got all the quotations as it’s fresh in my memory.

Thing is, SWAT 4-style, as fun as it might be, isn’t really anything like Aliens.
Aliens featured a bunch of yahoos with high tech equipment completely unprepared to deal with an actual enemy and careering around without a plan. SWAT is all about being a high disciplined, highly prepared team executing a plan (albeit often an improvised one) very methodically.

CMaster: You’re right, I guess what I’d thought was one turning into the other. Like, initially trying to work toward wherever the queen is (or perhaps it being L4D-style maps and that ALWAYS being what you’re doing.) So at first you’re dealing with smaller numbers, having time to scan and sweep rooms in a bit more organised fashion before you got to the point where planning wasn’t going to happen as you get swarmed.

This was all based on nothing more than my own random speculation, obviously.

I remember reading about something to do with the motion tracker being on the controller-tablet-thingy, and a VG journalist complaining about how that would screw up gameplay because you gotta take your eyes off the game to look at it vs having the more functional standard (though much less gimmicky) of having it up on the hud.

I have no clue to be honest. I know little to nothing of consolery, as I am not in possession of any box-to-tv arm-waggling device. I just thought the motion sensor seemed like a good fit for that wii u gun-style controller.

It just occurred to me how many previews/trailers etc end with the a shot of the bad guy or thing lunging at you with its jaws, or smashing you with something, or shooting you in the face, or at least getting all up in the camera with the threatening roars and whatnot. Even more so in some of the Bioshock first-person trailers, where the player is violently taken apart by a Big Daddy. HERE IS OUR GAME. YOU WILL BE KILLED. RARR!

Sorry, wait, what? Set in the remains of the colony? What remains? It was a pre-fab about 2 minutes away from ground zero from a nuclear explosion apparently the size of Nebraska. Never mind that the planet itself is tiny anyway, a mere 1200km in diameter.

that’s been covered already: Randy looked deeply into the camera and proclaimed “well duh I know what “cannon” is …. it shoots balls! hehh, I said balls.”

no seriously, the dude said he doesn’t give a shit about cannon or physics. he wants the game to be on the same planet as the movie, with the same locations (conveniently making the amount of necessary original concept art virtually zero), and is willing to retcon anything and everything he has to to get it.

I know, would it have been so difficult to set it on a different coloney somewhere else on a different planet?

Also I was hoping for something a little more tactical and free roaming than just a straight linear run and gun. Some thing like having a objectives to achieve in a certain area and having blueprints of the building before going in, and having guys kitted out for different roles, engineeers sealing off doors etc.

I’m still hoping this will be a fun game anyway, but this is starting to look like it will be another game with lots of missed opportunities to make something really standout special.

and yes, sadly, this movie has been used as source material for virtually every Sci-Fi video game since it came out. which really pisses me off, I was in the Marines and I fucking hated it, so it’s like nails on a chalkboard every time some excessively angry ethnic minority character screams “lets go marines!”

I have to ask. Is the aliens mythos really deep enough to warrant such a big franchise. The first two films were great and all but how many times can you have the same big twist before it just gets ridiculous.
“You mean that shadowy corporation was trying to breed xenos as weapons? How unexpected!”

Actually, yes. There was a whole set of comic books that were pretty awesome and deepened the mythos and sweep of the films.

Basically, what happened next was the aliens are unleashed and destroy the earth, but there are plenty of other planets, and so plenty of other places to have aliens vs marines, especially as the aliens could mate with any of the local hostiles (think: giant fish aliens or birds).

Some strips went religious and got into the whole angels v demons thing, sometimes with aliens as demons, sometimes with aliens as angels cleansing the universe of sin. Another was about farming an alien/human hybrid for an addictive drug, that had a whole city under siege from aliens and bounty hunters.

I think if they went the comic book route they could have had multiple planets with hostiles to remove, space stations and cities, tropical paradises and ice cold caverns, instead it looks like a rather straight forward corridor shooter.

Sounds cool, though I’d personally like to see a bit more depth and mystery added to the Alien franchise (somehow! No idea how. If I did I’d be fanficking it).

I’ve always loved Giger’s artwork and the concept of these strange, eery biomechanoid species infecting starships and killing the inhabitants for no reason other than ‘that’s just what they do’ appealed to the Lovecraft fan in me, and so I really loved Alien (complete with the almost indestructable antagonist with it’s bizarre physiology and seeming ability to survive in the vacuum of space).

‘Aliens’ sort of lost something. It had too many of them, and they could be shot with pulse rifles. It was a bit like a cross between a ‘Nam film and a zombie flick. It lost the creepy silence of space too, and even though I fancied Vasquez and generally enjoyed the film it’s not one that I return to time and time again.

I’d like to see a mod (or something) akin to Alien, or Alien 3 – a survival horror with darkness, silence, very limited weapons and only a tiny chance of survival against an insurmountable foe. Something that requires careful thought, planning and strategy, as well as basic animal cunning, to survive.

Anyway, yes, Aliens did lose the slow, creeping psychological horror of Alien, but I was always quite pleased it went in a different direction with the sequel (which I love equally). I’m not sure a straightforward, similarly themed sequel would have been compared favourably against the first, whereas the action-shootery of Aliens couldn’t be directly compared. If anything, Alien 3 is probably more of a sequel to the first in terms of atmosphere (as Resurrection is to Aliens).

Aliens lends itself more easily to gaming on the action side of things, but I think to get a true experience of Alien you’d probably have to make something similar to Amnesia. Christ even thinking of playing an Alien-themed Amesia makes me uneasy.